Title says it all basically! I have an abstract understanding that heightening class conflict can be managed by creating scapegoats and enemies, but nothing exactly gels with e.g. Roe being overturned.
EDIT:
“Imperialism strives for reaction everywhere” Lenin
On some level people are aware of their exploitation under capitalism which increases as the rate of exploitation increases. This awareness can be revolutionary, it can push people into struggle against their oppressors. However, this awareness can be hijacked by reactionary ideology and fascism which redirects struggle towards racial, ethnic, gender and sexual minorities.
Some analysis from Anuradha Ghandy in 'Fascism, Fundamentalism, and Patriarchy' (2001):
Imperialism faced with its worst ever crisis since the inter-war years is encouraging and promoting fundamentalist forces and fascist organisations and propaganda. And one of the central points of fundamentalist propaganda is a conservative ideology of gender – they proclaim the specific agenda of restoring the centrality of the family and home in the life of women and patriarchal control over her sexuality. Hence ideologues of the New Right even in the US are claiming that there is a moral crisis in American society and this is because of the fact that women are working outside the home. Though they have mobilised actively around opposition to abortion rights for women, they begin by arguing that welfare state expenditures have raised taxes and added to inflation, pulling the married woman into the labour force and thereby destroying the fabric of the patriarchal family and hence the moral order of society.
My main issue is justifying the claim in the paragraph after the Lenin quote.
My summary take, not really analysis but here it is anyway, is that it's because of heightening material conditional crises, precarious living conditions, and a population that by and large has been trained to never blame the ruling class, only the undesirables around them, for every grievance from not having job security to not having affordable rent to not getting laid.
The chapo guys, mostly Christman, have an interesting thesis that since mass politics died these guys can't really form a bloc. And the belief in bourgeois democracy is just dead, the only thing the state can do is provision pain - so increasingly, the only live political question is who do you wanna hurt, trans, poor, rural, MAGA, etc.
So when these guys get totally torqued (by a combo of the pain in their lives and their media aiming and sharpening their reaction towards the oppressed instead of the oppressors), they don't have like a red army faction to grab them or the friekorps, and the only political opinion they can express is wanting to hurt people - so they take it to the logical conclusion of individual mass shooting. Sometimes without targets in mind like the Las Vegas shooter (which was possibly just some fed op).
Because conditions are getting materially worse and we don’t have a solution that would immediately benefit them. And honestly if we are talking about white americans, it’s not like their material conditions are capable of being maintained, they are too damn high compared to the rest of the world. The whole american dream of a car a house and a family is unsustainable. The best we can do is a free apartment and healthcare. Our base has always lied outside the western powers with the people of the global majority. If anything we should view the westerner as the adversary and there’s no revolutionary potential among them. The dangerous thing about fascism is that it can provide greater material conditions to the class of people it represents at the expense of literally everyone else.
This type of third-worldism is defeatist. From Chapter 5 of 'A Critique of Maoist Reason' by J Moufawad-Paul:
We do not have to (and we should not) deny the super-exploita- tion that develops under imperialism allowing first world workers to benefit from imperialism, to reject this concept of net-exploitation. While the export of capital allows for the first world worker to be less exploited, and thus live a better life than their third world contempo- rary, to claim that the first world worker is not exploited––even in a limited sense––is to make the absurd claim that there is no reason for first world capitalists to maintain a first world work force in any sense and that the only reason they are doing so is because they are fully col- laborating with their counterparts in global exploitation. If first world workers are not exploited, then we need to ask why there is a continu- ous drive of wage-lowering, a consistent cap on the wages of first world workers, and the tendency to casualize labour––not to mention union busting, the use of undocumented labour, assaults on benefits, etc.
Of course, the limitation of exploitation makes first-worlders more primed towards fascism but being totally defeatist leads to an unactionable understanding of the world stage.
This is so on point and why it's really a horrible idea to alienate workers and leftists from privileged nations. There is no switch that takes the world off of the petrodollar overnight, it's a long process and one which the US will absolutely be willing to go to war over. If you think the US atrocities while on neoliberalism were bad, wait for a nuclear-armed US ginned up on fascism. Sure, I am biased because I live here, but in my view, the only way the US goes down without taking the rest of the planet with it is if it is dismantled from within.
Easy solution, just stop identifying as a Westerner. I just work here~
Because of what you said: reactionary thought arises from the same recognition of the contradictions that revolutionary thought comes from but accepts the ruling class’ framing that your opposition in the struggle is trans people or women or men or “antifa” or the proud boys or white ppl or black ppl or whatever.
Your example of roe in particular is because roe was a (drumroll please) stupid decision that’s incompatible with either reactionary or revolutionary thought and only existed to tread water until something better came along. Half a century went by and that didn’t happen so it went away.
Nothing changed to make families easier to raise in the face of the rise of the two income household so roe had to go.
If you’re interested in a different, very liberal, take: the reactionary idea is that there aren’t enough white babies (or black babies, if you live in Louisiana) being born and the solution is to force women to bear children by taking away their ability not to. That neatly fits into reaction taking a real problem and only looking at who’s yelling about it and picking a side.
